Wikipedia <span class="text-and">and</span> Wikipediahttp://www.businessinsider.com/category/wikipedia
en-usTue, 03 Mar 2015 18:24:37 -0500Tue, 03 Mar 2015 18:24:37 -0500The latest news on Wikipedia <span class="text-and">and</span> Wikipedia from Business Insiderhttp://static3.businessinsider.com/assets/images/bilogo-250x36-wide-rev.pngBusiness Insiderhttp://www.businessinsider.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-24-most-important-apps-on-my-phone-2015-2The 24 most important apps on my phonehttp://www.businessinsider.com/the-24-most-important-apps-on-my-phone-2015-2
Wed, 04 Feb 2015 13:34:00 -0500Gus Lubin
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/54d25ca46bb3f7d3727bb1d3-640-1136/img_4066-2.jpg" border="0" alt="IMG_4066">You get 24 apps on the iPhone 5s home screen. For somewhat obsessive people like me, that means you have to rank your apps to determine which ones belong in that most accessible location and, moreover, which belong on the bottom half where they can be easily thumbed or on the bottom row where they carry over to other screens.</span></p>
<p>(Some people cram more apps onto the page using folders, but I find that counterproductive in that it forces additional taps to open an app.)</p>
<p>These are the 24 most important apps in my life right now:</p>
<p><strong>Bottom row (most important):</strong></p>
<p>Mail: You've got lots of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/gmail-app-for-iphone-new-updates-2014-3">Gmail advocates</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/qa-with-mailbox-founder-gentry-underwood-2013-5">Mailbox true believers</a>, and a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-outlook-for-iphone-might-be-the-best-gmail-app-2015-1">people who swear by Microsoft's new Outlook app</a>, but I've never had any complaints with Mail.</p>
<p><span><span>Safari: Ditto. I've heard people recommend other apps, but this one gets the job done and I use it often.</span></span></p>
<p><span>Messages: Again, I'm sticking with the default.</span></p>
<p>Phone: I still use the iPhone as a phone often enough to keep it in this row.<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img class="float_left" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/54d25d2269bedd5c02a2f931-640-1136/img_4064-1.jpg" border="0" alt="IMG_4064">Second row:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alien-blue-reddit-official/id923187241?mt=8">Alien Blue</a><span>: The best way to read Reddit, which is why Reddit bought this third party app a few months ago. (And if you're not using Reddit, I'd recommend it as a great place to find the best content on the web.)</span></p>
<p>Newsstand: Oh how I hate the Newsstand. There's only one publication in my Newsstand and that's <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nytimes-breaking-national/id284862083?mt=8">The New York Times</a>, but every time I want to open the Times, I have to open the Newsstand first, and there's no way around that. Still, I read the Times every day so the Newsstand gets this spot.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354?mt=8">Google Maps</a>: Apple Maps may have<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-maps-is-catching-up-to-google-maps-in-the-us-2013-11">&nbsp;improved a lot&nbsp;</a>since its disastrous launch, but it still can't handle subway directions. Living in New York City, that's a non-starter.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slack-team-communication/id618783545?mt=8">Slack</a>: Business Insider got on Slack recently and we love it. It's a beautifully designed tool for group and individual chats, and the mobile app works great.</p>
<p><strong><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/54d25d45ecad04ea2ead0f99-640-1136/img_4065.jpg" border="0" alt="IMG_4065">Third row:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/business-insider/id554260576?mt=8">Business Insider</a>: Check out our app to see the hottest news in business and everything else on the go. The only reason it's not higher on my home screen is because I read the site 10 hours a day on desktop.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/instagram/id389801252?mt=8">Instagram</a>: A social media app that, unlike <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facebook/id284882215?mt=8">Facebook</a>, is pleasant to look at and consistently entertaining.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/app/id945426580">MSN Sports</a>: This app does scores well but has an only mediocre array of news stories. Still, it's better than anything else I've seen. The <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/espn-sportscenter/id317469184?mt=8">ESPN Sportscenter</a> app used to be solid but then turned into a endless array of videos. I tried <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/365scores-live-sports-scores/id571801488?mt=8">365 Scores </a>and <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/thescore/id285692706?mt=8">The Score</a> but found them confusing.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Music: As an<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-i-love-itunes-match-2012-5"> iTunes Match</a> subscriber, I use this app for most of my music and streaming radio needs (as opposed to <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pandora-radio/id284035177?mt=8">Pandora</a>).</span></p>
<p><strong>Fourth row:</strong></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Notes: Who needs <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/evernote/id281796108?mt=8">Evernote</a>&nbsp;or <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/review-letterspace-note-taking-app-2015-2">Letterspace</a>? Apple's Notes app has all the functionality you need including desktop synchronization as well as nifty <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-use-siri-2014-8">Siri integration</a> ("Take note: bla bla bla").</span></p>
<p>Grantland: This is a link to the home page of a great site for essays on sports and entertainment, which apparently doesn't have an app.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/longform-a-smart-reader/id490437064?mt=8">Longform</a>: A pretty RSS reader that filters out long-form stories from hundreds of sources and includes editor recommendations.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yelp/id284910350?mt=8">Yelp</a>: Still the best way to find or contact local businesses.</p>
<p><strong><img class="float_left" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/54d25ddd6da8118550b59507-640-1136/img_4067.jpg" border="0" alt="IMG_4067">Fifth row:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dark-sky-weather-radar-hyperlocal/id517329357?mt=8">Dark Sky</a>: I recently switched to this $4 app instead of the Apple version. The catalyst was my desire to know more detailed precipitation predictions for the coming week. Dark Sky has that in spades as well as a pretty interface, weather maps, etc.</p>
<p>Calendar: Another good enough Apple app.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dictionary.com-dictionary/id308750436?mt=8">Dictionary</a>: Yes, you could just Google definitions or ask Siri, but I'm enough of a word geek that I value a devoted app, especially one that has etymologies. I even shelled out $2 to remove ads.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-mobile/id324715238?mt=8">Wikipedia</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">: Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the internet age. I use the app for easier reading, even though the app is decidedly mediocre.</span></p>
<p><strong>Sixth row:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1password-password-manager/id568903335?mt=8">1Password Pro</a>: $10! This app (which is free with limited features before a Pro upgrade) paired with the $50 1Password desktop license is not cheap, and yet it holds the solution to your ongoing password nightmare and your inevitable vulnerability to hackers. In other words, it's word it. Read more about signing up&nbsp;<a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/2839274/review-1password-5-for-mac-offers-state-of-the-art-protection-for-your-passwords-and-more.html">here</a>.</p>
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/54d25dffeab8ea0b0f89a692-640-1136/img_4068.jpg" border="0" alt="IMG_4068"></p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chess-pro-with-coach/id423198259?mt=8">Chess Pro</a>: $10! This program is not cheap, but after playing the free version up to its limit and reading reviews for this 5-star app, I took the plunge. I do not regret it. The program offers a clean and highly customizable chess app, including features like a precisely adjustable computer opponent that is just fun to play against and the abilities to view multiple recommended moves and study hundreds of classic games.</p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/amazon-music-with-prime-music/id510855668?mt=8">Amazon Music</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">: I'm one of the </span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-amazon-has-nearly-60-million-prime-members-2014-12">tens of millions of people</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> who joined Prime last year. One of the perks is the ability to stream a bunch of free albums and playlists (thus complementing Music's paid albums and radio).</span></p>
<p>App Store: I haven't found a lot of apps that really matter. Still, hope springs eternal. When I'm looking for some innovative program that will change my life, I call open the App Store.</p>
<p><em>Disclosure: I am an Apple investor.</em></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-use-siri-2014-8" >If you're still not using Siri, you're missing out</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-24-most-important-apps-on-my-phone-2015-2#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-comprised-of-bryan-henderson-wikignome-2015-2A Wikipedia editor has made 47,000 edits manually to correct one simple mistakehttp://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-comprised-of-bryan-henderson-wikignome-2015-2
Wed, 04 Feb 2015 08:24:00 -0500Rob Price
<p><strong><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/54d21dd4dd0895ac0a8b456f-1200-924/jimmy-wales-2.jpg" border="0" alt="Jimmy Wales">"A substance comprised of pigments suspended in a carrier is paint."</strong></p>
<p>Can you spot the mistake in the above sentence?</p>
<p>Answer: It's the use of the term "comprised of." It's a conflation of "comprised" and "composed of," and it's not technically correct. The sentence should say, "A substance <em>consisting of</em> pigments suspended in a carrier is paint." (Or, more clumsily, "Paint <em>comprises</em> pigments suspended in a carrier.")</p>
<p>"Comprised of" is in common usage, however, and most people don't realise it's wrong. But Bryan Henderson is on a mission to change that.&nbsp;<a href="https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-the-ultimate-wikignome-10508842caad">Backchannel reports that the 51-year-old software engineer is an extraordinarily active contributor to Wikipedia</a>, making 47,000 edits over the past decade — almost exclusively to correct other editors' incorrect usage of "comprised of."</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-the-ultimate-wikignome-10508842caad">Henderson told Backchannel that when he made his first edits</a> "and nobody came back and scolded me for it," he was hooked. He initially identified 15,000 incorrect uses of the term using Google and began methodically working through them. There was a backlash from editors, which "came as quite a surprise," as other Wikipedia users were irked to be corrected on a mistake they didn't realise they had made.</p>
<p>But Henderson persevered, and he wrote scripts that would hunt down uses of the term and flag them for him to correct. He has now corrected every single misuse of "comprised of" on English-language Wikipedia — no mean feat, considering the site has more than 4.7 million articles. Nonetheless, <a href="https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-the-ultimate-wikignome-10508842caad">between 70 and 80 new ones appear on the site each week, according to Backchannel</a>, and Henderson spends about an hour every Sunday night hunting them down.</p>
<p>He has even inspired his brother to take up a similar cause. Robin Henderson now keeps an eye out for the incorrect term "based around" (it should be "based on") on Wikipedia — though he says he doesn't have the same "search and destroy" attitude as Bryan.</p>
<p>Henderson (who lives in San Jose, California) has also written extensively on "comprised of," <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Giraffedata/comprised_of">justifying his actions with a 6,000-word mission statement on his user page</a>. Here some of the reasons — in his words — "comprised of" is "poor writing":</p>
<ul>
<li>It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of." It adds nothing to the language.</li>
<li>It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.</li>
<li>The etymology of the word does not support "comprised of." It comes from Latin words meaning to hold or grasp together. Other English words based on those same roots are "comprehensive" and "prehensile" (as in a monkey's prehensile tail; it can grab things). Comprise's French cousin also makes this clear.</li>
<li>It's new. Many Wikipedia readers learned to write at a time when no respectable dictionary endorsed "comprised of" in any way. It was barely ever used before 1970. Even now, style manuals frequently call out this particular usage as something not to do.</li>
<li>It's imprecise. English has a variety of ways to say things the writer means by "comprised of." "Composed of," "consists of," and "comprises" are subtly different. It often takes careful thought to decide just which one of these things the article should say. Thus the sentence with "comprised of" isn't quite as expressive.</li>
<li>Many writers use this phrase to aggrandise a sentence — to intentionally make it longer and more sophisticated. In these, a simple "of," "is," or "have" often produces a sentence that is easier to read (Example: "A team comprised of scientists" versus "a team of scientists").</li>
</ul>
<p>In Wikipedia parlance, Henderson — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Giraffedata">editing under the user name Giraffedata</a> — is a "WikiGnome." It's a type of editor who is happy to "make useful incremental edits without clamouring for attention," <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiGnome">according to the Wiki page on them</a>. He has received numerous accolades from the community for his work.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Giraffedata/comprised_of">He writes that he doesn't edit Wikipedia</a> "for personal taste" — it's because "the fact that lots of other people feel the same way is what makes it seem like a good edit to me."</p>
<p>"If I can spare any readers [the] discomfort [of seeing it] without hurting anyone else, why wouldn't I?"</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-comprised-of-bryan-henderson-wikignome-2015-2#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> <p>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/eighth-grader-invents-braille-printer-2015-1">A 13-Year-Old Made A Revolutionary Invention Out Of Legos And Now Intel Is Investing In His Company</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-influential-languages-2014-12These Charts Show Which Languages Have The Most Global Influencehttp://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-influential-languages-2014-12
Sun, 21 Dec 2014 09:03:00 -0500Drake Baer
<p>Many of most-spoken languages in the world — like Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic — are far from being the most influential.&nbsp;</p>
<p>As new <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/11/1410931111.full.pdf+html" target="_blank">MIT-led research suggests</a>, those languages live in relative isolation, while a few tiny tongues are hugely influential.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span>"A language like Dutch — spoken by 27 million people — can be a disproportionately large conduit, compared with a language like Arabic, which has a whopping 530 million native and second-language speakers,"&nbsp;</span><a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/12/want-influence-world-map-reveals-best-languages-speak" target="_blank">Science reports</a><span>. "This is because the Dutch are very multilingual and very online."&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>To find out which languages are the most influential around the world, MIT researchers Shahar Ronen, César Hidalgo, and their co-authors&nbsp;tracked book translations, multiple language editions of Wikipedia, and multilingual Twitter users to see how languages interact with one another. The below graphs show the connections different languages have with one another through these online platforms, forming what the authors call "Global Language Networks."&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>Here are the charts:&nbsp;</p>
<p><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/54906b3169beddc02b163a72-1153-745/screen shot 2014-12-16 at 11.58.28 am.png" border="0" alt="book translations chart"></p>
<p>&nbsp;<img src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/54906b4b6bb3f7ee38163a77-752-586/screen shot 2014-12-16 at 11.58.57 am.png" border="0" alt="wikipedia translation chart"></p>
<p><img src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/54906b6969bedd8828163a71-753-866/screen shot 2014-12-16 at 11.59.59 am.png" border="0" alt="twitter influential language"></p>
<p>Of course, this is an elite sample — most people don't have internet access — but these charts are a measure of influence, not population.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span>As you can see from the below graphics, some languages — namely, English — act as a hub for the world. And others like French, German, and Spanish serve as the hubs of other language families.</span></p>
<p>There are a few takeaways here. If you want your kids to be able to interact with large swathes of the world, teach them Spanish. But if you want them to be able to correspond with a more secluded group, go for Chinese.</p>
<p>This analysis sheds light on political dynamics as well.</p>
<p>As the authors argue in their conclusion:&nbsp;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Although languages such as&nbsp;Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi are immensely popular, we document&nbsp;an important sense in which these languages are more&nbsp;peripheral to the world’s network of linguistic influence.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">For&nbsp;example, the low volume of translations into Arabic, which had&nbsp;been identified as an obstacle to the dissemination of outside&nbsp;knowledge into the Arab world, is indicated by our book&nbsp;translation [global language network] and matched by the peripheral position of&nbsp;Arabic in the Twitter and Wikipedia&nbsp;[global language networks].</p>
<p>For more on the research methodology, head to&nbsp;<a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/12/want-influence-world-map-reveals-best-languages-speak" target="_blank">Science</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/11/1410931111.full.pdf+html" target="_blank">the study itself</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books" target="_blank">the MIT Media Lab site</a>.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-your-network-shapes-your-health-happiness-and-success-2014-4" >Who You Know Is Even More Important Than You Realize</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-influential-languages-2014-12#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-influential-languages-2014-12These Charts Show Which Languages Have The Most Global Influencehttp://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-influential-languages-2014-12
Tue, 16 Dec 2014 15:21:00 -0500Drake Baer
<p>Many of most-spoken languages in the world — like Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic — are far from being the most influential.&nbsp;</p>
<p>As new <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/11/1410931111.full.pdf+html" target="_blank">MIT-led research suggests</a>, those languages live in relative isolation, while a few tiny tongues are hugely influential.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span>"A language like Dutch — spoken by 27 million people — can be a disproportionately large conduit, compared with a language like Arabic, which has a whopping 530 million native and second-language speakers,"&nbsp;</span><a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/12/want-influence-world-map-reveals-best-languages-speak" target="_blank">Science reports</a><span>. "This is because the Dutch are very multilingual and very online."&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>To find out which languages are the most influential around the world, MIT researchers Shahar Ronen, César Hidalgo, and their co-authors&nbsp;tracked book translations, multiple language editions of Wikipedia, and multilingual Twitter users to see how languages interact with one another. The below graphs show the connections different languages have with one another through these online platforms, forming what the authors call "Global Language Networks."&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>Here are the charts:&nbsp;</p>
<p><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/54906b3169beddc02b163a72-1153-745/screen shot 2014-12-16 at 11.58.28 am.png" border="0" alt="book translations chart"></p>
<p>&nbsp;<img src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/54906b4b6bb3f7ee38163a77-752-586/screen shot 2014-12-16 at 11.58.57 am.png" border="0" alt="wikipedia translation chart"></p>
<p><img src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/54906b6969bedd8828163a71-753-866/screen shot 2014-12-16 at 11.59.59 am.png" border="0" alt="twitter influential language"></p>
<p>Of course, this is an elite sample — most people don't have internet access — but these charts are a measure of influence, not population.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span>As you can see from the below graphics, some languages — namely, English — act as a hub for the world. And others like French, German, and Spanish serve as the hubs of other language families.</span></p>
<p>There are a few takeaways here. If you want your kids to be able to interact with large swathes of the world, teach them Spanish. But if you want them to be able to correspond with a more secluded group, go for Chinese.</p>
<p>This analysis sheds light on political dynamics as well.</p>
<p>As the authors argue in their conclusion:&nbsp;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Although languages such as&nbsp;Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi are immensely popular, we document&nbsp;an important sense in which these languages are more&nbsp;peripheral to the world’s network of linguistic influence.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">For&nbsp;example, the low volume of translations into Arabic, which had&nbsp;been identified as an obstacle to the dissemination of outside&nbsp;knowledge into the Arab world, is indicated by our book&nbsp;translation [global language network] and matched by the peripheral position of&nbsp;Arabic in the Twitter and Wikipedia&nbsp;[global language networks].</p>
<p>For more on the research methodology, head to&nbsp;<a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/12/want-influence-world-map-reveals-best-languages-speak" target="_blank">Science</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/11/1410931111.full.pdf+html" target="_blank">the study itself</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books" target="_blank">the MIT Media Lab site</a>.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-your-network-shapes-your-health-happiness-and-success-2014-4" >Who You Know Is Even More Important Than You Realize</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-influential-languages-2014-12#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-france-cheese-bill-2014-12French Wikipedia Editors Want $6,000 To Buy Cheese (Which Raises Some Questions About The Site's Finances)http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-france-cheese-bill-2014-12
Wed, 03 Dec 2014 10:02:48 -0500Peter Farquhar
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/547f263add0895360f8b4651-1200-924/jimmy-wales.jpg" alt="Jimmy Wales" border="0"></p><p>A Wikipedia editor wants to buy at least 200 of France’s estimated 500 types of cheese so they can be eaten, photographed and catalogued.</p>
<p>Wikimedia France, a group of editors recognised as a chapter, of the Wikimedia Foundation, not only wants their readers to buy the cheeses, but also the photographic equipment needed to snap them. It’s nearly reached the $6,000 goal it says it needs via <a href="http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/wikicheese" target="_blank">crowdfunding site Kisskissbankbank</a>.</p>
<p>(UPDATE: <em>The Wikimedia Foundation has asked to clarify a few points about this story. We’ve noted their concerns and you can read them at the end of the post.</em>)</p>
<p>Obviously, it’s completely Wikimedia Foundation’s business as to how Wikipedia editors raise money, but there’s a rising tide of concern over the foundation’s perceived need to rely on handouts and the way it chooses to spend donations.</p>
<p>In September, the <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e3/FINAL_13_14From_KPMG.pdf" target="_blank">Wikimedia Foundation put out its latest financial statements</a> and revealed a surprisingly healthy bottom line.</p>
<p><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/547f263add0895360f8b464f-679-213/screen%20shot%202014-12-03%20at%202.12.25%20pm.png" alt="Wikipedia Statement" border="0" width="800"></p>
<p>As you can see, it listed total assets of more than $60 million, up an impressive $12 million from 2013. Nearly $28 million is cash and cash equivalents, up from $22 million a year ago.</p>
<p>Despite this, the online giant – a registered non-profit organisation – is currently rolling out its annual banner ads asking for $3 donations:</p>
<p><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/547f263add0895360f8b4650-680-120/wikiplea.jpg" alt="wikiplea" border="0" width="800"></p>
<p>Except the ads aren’t annual any more – they’re popping up several times a year and starting to annoy users who say they’d almost prefer advertising.</p>
<div><div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Wow! <a href="https://twitter.com/Wikipedia">@Wikipedia</a> is begging for money for a FOURTH time this year. FOUR times they have begged for money. All content is user provided. </p>— sevenwithcheese (@sevenwithcheese) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/534360412763201536">November 17, 2014</a>
</blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></div>
<div><div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
Wikipedia begging for donations per usual. "Advertising isn't evil" they say as they throw a second nag at me as I scroll down. </p>— world anime champion (@enemyplayer) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/539180814739988481">November 30, 2014</a>
</blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></div>
<div><div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>
<a href="https://twitter.com/Wikipedia">@Wikipedia</a> Run ads. Please. Begging is beneath you. Put a "hide advertising" button on the site for your pride, if you really must. </p>— Michael Crider (@MichaelCrider) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/537259885788815361">November 25, 2014</a>
</blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></div>
<p>The Wikimedia Foundation says it only runs its contribution campaign on English Wikipedia once a year, in December:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">“If users are seeing more than one banner, it may be because they are using more than one language versions of Wikipedia, or they may be seeing test banners. We work to minimise the number of banners seen by any one user, and users who contribute will not be shown the banner again.”</p>
<p>UK publication The Register has a sharpish comment piece about <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/01/penniless_and_desperate_wikipedia_sits_on_60m_cash/" target="_blank">why it’s probably time Wikipedia looked after its own income</a>. Its total liabilities sit at $7m, and hosting costs a tick over $2.5 million, so it’s probably too early to have the knives completely out. But The Register is not the only one sharpening them.</p>
<p>There’s been a long-running campaign to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/pr-agencies-agree-to-stop-wikipedia-edits-2014-6" target="_blank">weed out an army of PR “sockpuppets”</a> that spend paid full time hours editing entries to benefit their clients. Another campaign aims to address the perceived <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/growing-army-of-women-take-on-wikipedia-2014-2" target="_blank">sexism problem at the site</a>. (85% of editors are male.)</p>
<p>And at the heart of it all is simply the fact that after 13 years online, it has become an environment where newcomers just don’t feel welcome. It’s not quite the collaborative effort as it was in the early days. This <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/" target="_blank">quote from Technology Review sums it up</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.</p>
<p>Co-founder Jimmy Wales is never too far away from defending the site or being shown to want to make all the right changes. There’s even a comprehensive <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia" target="_blank">Criticism of Wikipedia page</a>, to its credit.</p>
<p>But $28 million in cash reserves, up $8 million on a year ago, is a great base from which to take some direct action to push Wikipedia, perhaps by breaking its own rule and considering an advertising stream, into a space from where it’s not so easy for the pot-shots to keep building.</p>
<p>In the meantime, it might not be a bad idea to have a quiet word to Wiki editors brazenly asking for $6000 in cheese <em>and</em> cameras to not push their luck.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE</strong>: Here’s the Wikimedia Foundation’s clarification on their relationship with Wiki editors:</p>
<ul>
<li>This fundraising campaign on KissKissBankBank is not a Wikimedia Foundation project but rather an effort initiated by the volunteer editors (“Wikimedians”) affiliated with Wikimedia France.</li>
<li>Wikimedia France is an independent organisation that supports French members of the Wikimedia movement.</li>
<li>The Wikimedia Foundation does not create content for the site or set editorial policy for Wikipedia. All content creation and editorial policy is undertaken entirely by volunteers, including articles and photographs about cheese.</li>
<li>The Wikimedia Foundation was not involved in or aware of the project prior to its launch. No Wikimedia Foundation staff have been involved in this fundraising effort and no Wikimedia Foundation staff will have access to the funds raised in this project.</li>
<li>The WikiCheese project is a completely separate effort from the year-end contribution campaign run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The funds raised from the contribution campaign support the operating expenses of the Wikimedia sites, including servers and technical infrastructure, and global outreach programs.</li>
</ul><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-france-cheese-bill-2014-12#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-is-launching-its-own-version-of-wikipedia-2014-11Russia Is Launching Its Own Version Of Wikipediahttp://www.businessinsider.com/russia-is-launching-its-own-version-of-wikipedia-2014-11
Fri, 14 Nov 2014 06:08:00 -0500Tomas Hirst
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5465e2afdd0895d4568b460d-1200-924/putin-8.jpg" border="0" alt="Putin"></p><p>Russia is planning to launch its own version of Wikipedia to correct what it sees as errors about the country on the crowd-sourced encyclopedia.</p>
<p>An <a href="http://www.prlib.ru/events/Pages/Item.aspx?itemid=1077">article on the country's Presidential Library website</a> says Wikipedia has demonstrated an inability "to detail and reliably inform" its users about Russia.</p>
<p>This wouldn't be the first time that the Russian state has stepped in where it sees information that it disagrees with being distributed. In 2005 state-owned Ria Novosti launched news channel Russia Today to provide a "Russian approach to...news". On Monday <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/nov/10/russia-today-ofcom-sanctions-impartiality-ukraine-coverage">the channel was threatened with&nbsp;statutory sanctions by UK media regulator Ofcom</a> after it was found to have breached impartiality rules for broadcasters for the third time.</p>
<p>In conjunction with the National Library of Russia, the Presidential Library plans to launch a digital resource to provide "objective and accurate" information on the country to citizens. It will&nbsp;reportedly provide access to more than 50,000 books and archival documents from libraries across the country's 27 regions.</p>
<p>It plans to showcase "the country and its population, the diversity of the state and the national system of Russia" and, like Wikipedia, it will be constantly updated with new information as it becomes available.</p>
<p>However, there were no details as to whether users will be able to edit or submit information to the site — the basis of the Wikipedia model. Although this does pose problems for accuracy, it also allows for contributions from a wide range of sources giving it a breadth and depth of information that early competitors following a more traditional top-down model failed to keep pace with.</p>
<p>It also limits the scope for spreading deliberate misinformation, as users can report submissions that they believe to be inaccurate to Wikipedia's editors.</p>
<p>As the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About">Wikipedia's About Us section</a> explains:</p>
<p>"People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article prose, references, images and other media here. What is contributed is more important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor. What will remain depends upon whether the content is free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people, and whether it fits within Wikipedia's policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source, thereby excluding editors' opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research."</p>
<p>The Presidential Library is already confident of success, claiming the new site will be "one of the most popular Russian internet resources".</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-is-launching-its-own-version-of-wikipedia-2014-11#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/justin-knapp-on-future-of-wikipedia-2014-9This Guy Has Edited Wikipedia More Than 1.3 Million Times — And He Doesn't Believe In The Decline Of The Free Encyclopediahttp://www.businessinsider.com/justin-knapp-on-future-of-wikipedia-2014-9
Fri, 19 Sep 2014 17:59:00 -0400Gus Lubin
<p><span><span><img src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/541c49bd6da8112a27e54766-1200-858/justin_anthony_knapp-1.jpg" border="0" alt="Justin Anthony Knapp"></span></span></p>
<p>People have made a big deal about <a href="http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/">the supposed decline of Wikipedia</a>&nbsp;based on&nbsp;the fall in active editors on the English site from more than 51,000 in 2007 to <a href="http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm">32,000 </a>this year.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is this the beginning of the end for the free crowdsourced online encyclopedia that is </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites">the sixth most popular site worldwide</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Justin Knapp, the site's most prolific contributor with more than 1.3 million edits, isn't worried. He called Wikipedia "robust" in an email to Business Insider and explained that the English site has reached a point where it can survive with fewer editors.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The number of editors as such is not necessarily a problem — eventually, the content of the encyclopedia will become more-or-less complete and what's required is curation and maintenance. By the time you get to 4 million articles in one language, it's close to done in terms of adding new articles," he wrote.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What matters more than sheer number is diversity.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"There are certainly problems," Knapp wrote, "huge lacunas in the type of knowledge we have, other language editions which are far smaller, and an evidently unwelcoming environment for new users and women in particular. Although it's conceivably possible that a complete and accurate encyclopedia can be maintained by men, it's not desirable that a common resource is off-putting to a majority of the population.</span></p>
<p>Wikipedia has several projects underway that are meant to help with diversity, <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/">as discussed last year by Tom Simonite in the MIT Technology Review</a>. As for the decline in editors, it goes against <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#mediaviewer/File:ActiveWikipedians.PNG">the wildly optimistic goals of the Wikimedia Foundation</a>, but the Foundation's executive director at the time, Sue Gardner, told Simonite there is no proof that it is harming Wikipedia.</p>
<p><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/541c556e6bb3f75d5ff1a553-1156-585/screen shot 2014-09-19 at 12.09.18 pm.png" border="0" alt="wikipedia active editors"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><br></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So who keeps Wikipedia running?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We asked Knapp, who received international news coverage in 2012 for being the first to pass 1 million edits, some questions about his habits.&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The 31-year-old graduated from <span>Indiana University</span>&nbsp;with bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and political science. He works at a pizza shop and also on a crisis line, at the American Friends Service Committee, and at a grocery co-op.&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Our exchange is presented below, lightly edited for clarity.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Business Insider:</strong> How much time do you spend editing Wikipedia and when do you do it?</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Justin Knapp:&nbsp;</span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That's hard to say as there is no typical day. What I edit, how, and for how long are totally contingent upon what's going on in my life. When I was unemployed, it was a lot more than when I've been working 90 hours a week. Over the years, I've changed to doing lots of small maintenance tasks, concentrating on high quality work with references, and attempting to connect&nbsp;</span><span class="il" style="line-height: 1.5em;">Wikipedia</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">with other free content projects (including other Wikimedia Foundation projects).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/541c6db8ecad04e208662e0a-1100-623/great_lakes_2011_training.jpg" border="0" alt="wikipedian training session">BI:</strong>&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What sort of edits do you make?</span></p>
<p><span><span><strong>Knapp:</strong> I make edits of all kinds but my go-to edits are small style and typo fixes (such as replacing hyphens with ndashes). I have also written new articles from scratch, approved edits from new users, rearranged and split categories, marked content for deletion or renaming, added citations where needed — pretty much anything that needs to be done all across the encyclopedia.</span></span></p>
<p>Edits I have made lately include&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Simon_Pulsifer&amp;diff=prev&amp;oldid=626157265" target="_blank">adding a navigation box to the bottom of an article</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Love_(Beatles_album)&amp;diff=prev&amp;oldid=626155617" target="_blank">taking out unsourced content</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Margot_%26_the_Nuclear_So_and_So%27s&amp;diff=prev&amp;oldid=626153087" target="_blank">adding categories</a>. I haven't added much in the way of content--just making adjustments. Before that, I made several thousand changes to styling issues regarding italicization. What I focus on changes day to day: sometimes, I notice a small problem with articles that is widespread and can be easily addressed. Other times, a new event (e.g. an album release) will occur and I want to cover it. For instance, I just started the article on&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Davidson" target="_blank">Pete Davidson</a>. I have also spent some time editing&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography" target="_blank">Spanish orthography</a>&nbsp;and created a&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wiktes" target="_blank">template</a>&nbsp;to ease my efforts by inserting links to dictionary definitions from Wiktionary. I don't have any MO as such other than making the encyclopedia better. A few perennial ones are changing hyphens to ndashes or mdashes, tagging pages that have bad references, and creating links between&nbsp;<span class="il">Wikipedia</span>&nbsp;and other Wikimedia Foundation projects or external projects like DMOZ and OpenStreetMap.</p>
<p><span><span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>BI:</strong> What contributions are you most proud of?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Knapp:</strong> I am most proud of helping other users if I can. When it comes to the content of my work, I think the&nbsp;</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell_bibliography" target="_blank">George Orwell bibliography</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;and my article on&nbsp;</span><em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_That_Happens_Will_Happen_Today" target="_blank">Everything That Happens Will Happen Today</a>&nbsp;</em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">are pretty high-quality, if not perfect. The article on&nbsp;</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_%28album%29" target="_blank"><em>Illinois</em></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;is high-quality and was written by collaboration which is basically the point of the encyclopedia.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/541c5abceab8eab807bea493-800-294/justin-knapp-wikipedia-articles.jpg" border="0" alt="justin knapp wikipedia articles"><strong>BI:</strong> Will any other contributors match your total?</span></p>
<p><span><span><strong>Knapp:</strong> In terms of sheer numbers, there are only a&nbsp;</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MOSTEDITS" target="_blank">couple of users</a><span>&nbsp;which have near as many as me but the actual edit count is not as important as the quality. In that sense, many users have surpassed me. There are plenty of edits I make that have low value individually but you add them up and it makes the encyclopedia better. Other users put forth significant effort on a few edits that are very valuable individually. The thing that makes this project function is everyone doing their part. I'm impressed by anyone who puts forth serious, scholarly effort and freely shares that knowledge with the world, such as my late friend&nbsp;</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrianne_Wadewitz" target="_blank">Adrianne Wadewitz</a><span>. I am also particularly grateful to the software developers who make the back end structure of MediaWiki possible because they have skills that I entirely lack.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span><span><strong>BI:</strong> What do you think about the health of&nbsp;</span><span class="il">Wikipedia</span><span>&nbsp;as a whole?</span></span></span></p>
<p><span><span><strong>Knapp:</strong> I think that&nbsp;</span><span class="il">Wikipedia</span><span>&nbsp;is generally a robust and useful project and that the Wikimedia Foundation and greater&nbsp;</span><span class="il">Wikipedia</span><span>&nbsp;community generally make the right decisions. The number of editors as such is not necessarily a problem--eventually, the content of the encyclopedia will become more-or-less complete and what's required is curation and maintenance. By the time you get to 4 million articles in one language, it's close to done in terms of adding new articles. There are certainly problems, though--huge lacunas in the type of knowledge we have, other language editions which are far smaller, and an evidently unwelcoming environment for new users and women in particular. Although it's conceivably possible that a complete and accurate encyclopedia can be maintained by men, it's not desirable that a common resource is off-putting to a majority of the population.</span></span></p>
<p><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/541c5e0b6da8112d1bc495a0-1024-768/wikipedia-sand-art.jpg" border="0" alt="Wikipedia sand art." style="color: #000000;"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">BI:&nbsp;</span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">What motivates you to contribute to&nbsp;</span><span class="il" style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">Wikipedia</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">?</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>Knapp:</strong> I am motivated by two broad interests. On the one hand, editing&nbsp;</span><span class="il" style="color: #000000;">Wikipedia</span><span style="color: #000000;">&nbsp;is a hobby: it's fun and relaxing. I can do it most any time I want. It's not mandatory and I can start and stop whenever and however I feel. On the other hand, it's an expression of my values--a way to encourage sharing, free culture, community, privacy, and liberty. I think that is true of a lot of Wikipedians in general. When the project started, it was made up of guys who were into making an encyclopedia and guys who were into free software and free culture. This is a product of both of those desires.</span></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/glasnost-wikipedias-boss-shape-site-2014-8" >What Wikipedia learned from the Soviet Union</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/justin-knapp-on-future-of-wikipedia-2014-9#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/someone-on-capitol-hill-is-editing-wikipedia-articles-on-transgender-topics-2014-8Someone On Capitol Hill Seems Obsessed With Editing Wikipedia Articles On Transgender Topicshttp://www.businessinsider.com/someone-on-capitol-hill-is-editing-wikipedia-articles-on-transgender-topics-2014-8
Wed, 20 Aug 2014 16:35:00 -0400Colin Campbell
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/53f4e8e2ecad047f5cf7d185-480-/congressedits-1.jpg" alt="congressedits" border="0" width="480"></p><p>An anonymous user with an IP address coming from the U.S. House of Representatives has repeatedly made edits to Wikipedia articles on topics related to the transgender community.</p>
<p>These edits generally appear critical of transgender individuals, and other users have called the changes "hate speech."</p>
<p>Since Monday, the user has made over a half dozen such edits, according to the tracking tool <a href="https://twitter.com/congressedits">@congressedits</a>. For example, a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=621925783&amp;oldid=618718819">Tuesday edit</a> to an article on Camp Trans, an annual event that protests the exclusion of transgender women from a music festival, made sure to note the festival event was hosted by "real women." This change was promptly reversed.</p>
<p>It's impossible to know whether the edits are coming from one or multiple users, but the changes come from an IP address, 143.231.249.138, that has <a href="http://mashable.com/2014/07/14/house-of-representatives-wikipedia-anonymous/">repeatedly been linked</a> to House of Representatives computers. In the "talk" discussion section of one article, an individual making the changes has also claimed to be a staffer on Capitol Hill.</p>
<p>The anonymous user has demonstrated a relatively specific focus on transgender topics. For example, a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=622084228&amp;oldid=613301108">Wednesday edit</a> to the "Tranny" article changed the phrase "assigned sex" to "biological sex" — a term that has been <a href="http://www.autostraddle.com/its-time-for-people-to-stop-using-the-social-construct-of-biological-sex-to-defend-their-transmisogyny-240284/">criticized as transphobic</a>. Articles on "body integrity identity disorder" and "gender identity disorder" were also edited. Even the Wikipedia article on transphobia was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=621783348&amp;oldid=621674900">edited on Tuesday</a> to include an external link — since been removed for its reported <a href="http://thoughtcatalog.com/gavin-mcinnes/2014/08/transphobia-is-perfectly-natural/">"hateful or abusive content"</a> — defending transphobia.</p>
<p>"This article is too pro-trans," the user <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Transphobia#Neutral_point_of_view">complained</a> after his or her edit was removed. "When I attempted to add an alternative point of view regarding this topic ... it was reverted right away."</p>
<p>These changes have led to calls for Wikipedia to ban edits from Congress' IP addresses again. The popular online encyclopedia <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-bans-us-congress-2014-7">previously instituted</a> a 10-day ban in July after the @congressedits account, which which monitors Wikipedia changes coming from IP addresses associated with Congress, flagged a number of absurd changes to the site's articles.</p>
<p>"An obvious transphobe is using this IP to edit the article on transphobia, justifying it with rhetoric commonly used by transphobes," <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:143.231.249.138#This_IP_needs_to_be_blocked._Again.">wrote another user</a>, Davidjcobb. "They claim to be acting with the explicit permission of a U.S. Representative, which is either an outright lie (and therefore more reason to block the IP) or true (and therefore more reason to block the IP)."</p>
<p>The anonymous House user has defended the edits by making specific claims about transgender policies on the federal level.</p>
<p>"What is your obsession with the users from this shared IP address?" the person <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Transphobia#Neutral_point_of_view">wrote</a> in response. "When you have other Representatives trying to push for laws such as ENDA, or when you have the EU using neocolonialist methods to impose transgenderism on the nation of Georgia through a visa agreement, it's all the more important."</p>
<p><strong>Update (7:48 a.m.):</strong> <em>It appears the House user <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:143.231.249.138#August_2014">has just been blocked</a> from making anonymous Wikipedia edits for a period of one month.</em></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/someone-on-capitol-hill-is-editing-wikipedia-articles-on-transgender-topics-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/robin-williams-death-crashed-wikipedia-2014-8News Of Robin Williams' Death Crashed His Wikipedia Pagehttp://www.businessinsider.com/robin-williams-death-crashed-wikipedia-2014-8
Mon, 11 Aug 2014 22:26:00 -0400Brett Arnold
<p>After news of Robin Williams'&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/actor-robin-williams-found-dead-in-his-home-2014-8" target="_blank">tragic death</a> hit late Monday, the world can't consume enough of the comedian's past work.</p>
<p>So much so that his Wikipedia page crashed from all of the traffic.</p>
<p>The page is back up and running now, but moments after Williams' death, here's what the page looked like:</p>
<p><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/53e973686da811cb2a273a35-719-250/10468086_10202727646649623_9037230199420199068_n.jpg" border="0" alt="10468086_10202727646649623_9037230199420199068_n"></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/celebrities-react-to-the-tragic-death-of-robin-williams-2014-8#ixzz3A8khu7u9" >Robin Williams Celebrities Celebrities React To The Tragic Death Of Robin Williams</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/robin-williams-death-crashed-wikipedia-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-takes-aim-at-the-developing-world-by-making-itself-free-and-accessible-2014-8Wikipedia Takes Aim At The Developing World By Making Itself Free And Accessiblehttp://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-takes-aim-at-the-developing-world-by-making-itself-free-and-accessible-2014-8
Sat, 09 Aug 2014 10:01:49 -0400Samuel Gibbs
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/53e629a66bb3f72672a3c142-1200-924/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-11.jpg" border="0" alt="Jimmy Wales Wikipedia"></p><p>Wikipedia can be read for free by 350 million mobile phone subscribers in the developing world, its engineering chief has said - a result of partnerships with mobile phone operators which began in Malaysia in 2012.</p>
<p>Wikipedia Zero was inspired by Facebook Zero, an ambition by the social network to colonise new, mobile-centric audiences around the world. For Erik Möller, deputy director of parent organisation the Wikimedia Foundation, the project answers two key priorities, building new international audiences and focusing on mobile devices.</p>
<p>“By working with mobile operators, we can enable anyone to read and edit for free,” explained Möller, who is also vice president of engineering and product development. “We estimate that 350 million subscribers worldwide are eligible to use Wikipedia Zero.”</p>
<p>Wikipedia Zero allows mobile subscribers to access Wikipedia for free, with no data charges, the programme now stretches to Thailand, Saudia Arabia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, Jordan and Bangladesh, and this year also added Kosovo, Nepal and Kyrgyzstan.</p>
<p>“Hundreds of millions of people are coming online using mobile phones,” Möller told the Guardian. “We must provide the best possible experience for these users, both for reading and for contributing content, to truly enable every person on the planet to share in the sum of all knowledge.”</p>
<p>Möller’s focus has been on solid apps for the iPhone and Android, as well as allowing contributors to edit on smartphones. “On a technical level, this also means making a platform written for the desktop web fully mobile-ready, which is a major undertaking,” he said.</p>
<p>Mobile use is important because it is helping to close the digital divide, especially in developing nations where mobile data connections outstrip traditional fixed line broadband connections. Even then, the cost of internet access can be prohibitive and therefore impinges on Wikimedia’s “open information for all” principle.</p>
<p>He singles out the complex markup and tools required to edit articles, which have a steep learning curve that can deter new users. “We’re building a new visual editing environment without markup. In terms of empowering anyone on the planet to contribute to our projects, we believe this is the single most important technical change that’s under way,” said Möller.</p>
<p>Number two to Lila Tretikov, newly installed executive director of Wikimedia, Möller shares Tretikov’s drive to improve Wikipedia’s technology describing it as “in some respects a website following 20th century paradigms”.</p>
<p>In his 13 years with Wikimedia Foundation, Möller has been instrumental in its technical developments, from the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia and others to Wikipedia Commons the online repository of photos, sounds and other media files used across the site.</p>
<p>A San Francisco-based German journalist, author and software developer with strong outspoken views on a range of topics, Möller was first an editor of Wikipedia under the pseudonym of “Eloquence”, then a developer. Wikinews, a service like Wikipedia but for short-lived news articles, was his first big contribution with high-profile roles during the reporting of the London bombings in 2005.</p>
<p>Later that year he was appointed Wikimedia’s chief research officer, but resigned after just three months, citing personal differences with board members.</p>
<p>Möller was elected to the board, and in 2006 replaced Angela Beesley - the British co-founder of Wikia alongside Jimmy Wales - before resigning in 2007 to take up the deputy director role.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania">Wikimania</a>, the annual Wikimedia Foundation conference, runs from 6-10 August at London’s Barbican Centre</em></p>
<p>• This article was edited on Friday 8 August to remove an incorrect reference to Erik Möller.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<!-- Guardian Watermark: internal-code/content/443950617|2014-08-08T20:21:42Z|89aa6fd96262723ef7410e6f858c21150c69ef71 -->
<p>This article originally appeared on <a rel="canonical">guardian.co.uk</a></p>
<p><img class="nc_pixel" src="https://pixel.newscred.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT0wZjdkZDZiYjJjOTVkMzg4YTkwMGJhZTE0YzMyMjRhOSZub25jZT00ZTRlZWJmYy1jZDg0LTRlY2EtYTAyMi1iZWE5MTY2NjE5NzYmcHVibGlzaGVyPTczMGViODZhYjU5ZjBkNDE5MjZhYzY1YjAxZjgzZTJm" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1"></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-messenger-app-store-reviews-are-humiliating-2014-8" >Facebook Messenger Is Getting Slammed By Tons Of Negative Reviews Right Now</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-takes-aim-at-the-developing-world-by-making-itself-free-and-accessible-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/glasnost-wikipedias-boss-shape-site-2014-8Lessons From The Soviet Union Are Helping Wikipedia's New Boss Shape The Sitehttp://www.businessinsider.com/glasnost-wikipedias-boss-shape-site-2014-8
Wed, 06 Aug 2014 12:56:00 -0400Jemima Kiss and Samuel Gibbs
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/53e25330ecad04b77e65f088-594-395/wikipedia-boss.jpg" border="0" alt="attached image" /></p><p>Lila Tretikov was still a child when the Soviet Union began to embrace glasnost in the 1980s. The new freedoms enabled Tretikov, an academically brilliant student, to move from Moscow to New York by herself, waitressing to learn English and pay for her last year of high school.</p>
<p>By the end of the year she was top of her Shakespeare class. Tretikov has since spent 18 years studying computer science and working with collaborative, &ldquo;open source&rdquo; software &ndash; and in May beat 1,300 candidates to the job of executive director of the world&rsquo;s fifth largest website, Wikipedia.</p>
<p>For Tretikov, there are parallels between glasnost and Wikipedia&rsquo;s own aspirations of transparency and openness. &ldquo;Glasnost was a phenomenal, renaissance period in the history of Russia and taught me much about importance of freedom of information,&rdquo; Tretikov told the Guardian in her first interview.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The only real way to improve conditions of civilisations is to provide open access to information for education and culture, and to be honest about the past. Otherwise we spend our lives siloed from each other and we repeat the mistakes of our grandparents.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Tretikov&rsquo;s academic work on machine learning got her a job at Sun Microsystems in 1999, and she founded her own marketing technology firm, GrokDigital, the following year. It was when she joined Silicon Valley&rsquo;s SugarCRM, which offers customer management software for businesses, that she was able to expand her interest in open source software, where the source code is published, shared and improved with the developer community.</p>
<p>Speaking in soft, heavily accented American, Tretikov, 36, is ambitious about Wikipedia&rsquo;s future. Yet her appointment was controversial among some of Wikipedia&rsquo;s notoriously boisterous community of volunteer editors.</p>
<p>The community includes a hardcore of around 3,000 volunteers who have all made at least 20,000 individual edits and when Tretikov admitted in a post that she had only just made her first edit on the English Wikipedia site there was an inevitable backlash.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We ended up with an amateur, and that&rsquo;s pretty frightening,&rdquo; wrote veteran editor Pete Forsyth in a leaked email. &ldquo;If she&rsquo;s got no keel on the open sea, who knows where her take on the community will wash up? It doesn&rsquo;t give me a lot of hope that she can chart a better course through the crippling dynamics of the last couple years.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Others were offended that her boyfriend, developer Wil Sinclair, had joined a site that scrutinises Wikipedia and its editors, describing Sinclair as &ldquo;her uninvited plus one&rdquo;. It prompted a characteristically rational response from Tretikov. &ldquo;I make my decisions using my own professional judgement,&rdquo; she wrote at the time. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t consult Wil on [Wikipedian] matters, ask him to do anything on my behalf or monitor his engagements with the community &hellip; We have always both been extremely independent.&rdquo;</p>
<p>There is often tension between volunteers and management in Wikipedia. A men&rsquo;s rights group claimed a &ldquo;feminist conspiracy&rdquo; was censoring its views on the site. It is a challenge for Tretikov to gain the confidence of its male-dominated volunteers, many of whom have worked on the site for years to establish its processes and norms, while at the same time making the site more appealing and accessible to new, more diverse editors.</p>
<p>Diversity is a big problem, with Wikipedia dominated by white, western men. Thirteen years since it launched, the site publishes and maintains more than 32m articles in 287 languages, all run through a complex and often exhaustingly democratic system of voting and consensus. But women are estimated to account for only 15% of the 80,000 regular editors, and volunteers in the developing world are also under-represented.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The most important thing for us is to lower the barrier to entry to this knowledge-building community,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;Our mission is to educate, so the more open we can be to different types of thinking, the more diverse we will be.&rdquo;</p>
<p>As the only non-commercial site of its scale, Wikipedia is an anomaly among the household names of the web. It remains a uniquely complex organisation, and Tretikov will have to help sustain its finances; the site costs $29m (&pound;17.2m) a year to run, and relies on charitable grants and donations from users, which increased from $4m to $45m under Tretikov&rsquo;s predecessor Sue Gardner. If it chose to display adverts to nearly half a billion people that use the site each month &ndash; as some commentators have pushed for &ndash; it could make nearly $3bn per year, by one estimate.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Knowledge is all about trust,&rdquo; says Tretikov. &ldquo;Not being beholden to demands of the market gives us freedom to do the right thing for the user first and foremost. It allows us to be much more focused on the users and what their needs are.&rdquo;</p>
<p>As the largest single source of free information in the world, Wikipedia also has to battle misinformation by corporations and governments, and is already being defended by some automated software or &lsquo;bots&rsquo; that publish a Twitter notification when articles relating to Congress, parliament or other public bodies have been edited by an insider.</p>
<p>Recent efforts have started to overhaul the site&rsquo;s editing system to make it easier and less technically demanding for new editors, but automated software could help here too. The English language Wikipedia already has nearly 2,000 approved bots, and across the whole Wikipedia networks bots accounted for 15% of Wikipedia&rsquo;s 19bn page views during July 2014. These programmes perform an array of mundane tasks from correcting spelling to updating standard census statistics and even reversing vandalism.</p>
<p>&ldquo;In the future, an editor without coding skills will have access to tools that could allow him or her to automatically scan, identify, and fill gaps in the knowledge with a few clicks of a button,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;[Programmers] are thinking about how we can augment and improve what humans do by handing off the grunt work to the machines - enabling us to focus on the creative, ingenious tasks. Our biggest challenge is to understand how things are changing in the way humans experience technology and be there for those that aren&rsquo;t even online yet.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Tretikov said she recognised concern about the increasing use of machines to automate human tasks. &ldquo;But computers are definitely much better than humans at processing large amounts of information, which is why that&rsquo;s where we use them most. There are emerging areas where bots could help us identify interesting things &ndash; that doesn&rsquo;t make computers creative in and of themselves, but they do help us amplify our own creativity.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Given the site&rsquo;s experiments with automation and Tretikov&rsquo;s academic interest in artificial intelligence (she has co-authored several patents), it is no surprise that her vision for Wikipedia is to assert itself as a technology company, rather than a media firm. Her first real test will come on Saturday, when she stands before the real-world congregation of Wikipedia to set out her plans for its future.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The only thing we can do to change things, is to charge ahead and change things through actions, through trying. Who knows, in 50 years we could be trying to help men change the status quo of the world, where women have been proven the capable ones.&rdquo;</p>
<!-- Guardian Watermark: internal-code/content/443923057|2014-08-06T15:25:04Z|c56988017e4488b8839af2ffa4e4cdb847d09a30 -->
<p>This article originally appeared on <a rel="canonical">guardian.co.uk</a></p>
<p><img class="nc_pixel" src="https://pixel.newscred.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT0yMjVmYjFmNDdmNDFmYzZjOWM3OGJlNWQxNGJkZGFiOCZub25jZT1iYTUyZDg5OC03MzE4LTRkZDItOTY3YS0yNjIxNDY1OWU5YjMmcHVibGlzaGVyPTczMGViODZhYjU5ZjBkNDE5MjZhYzY1YjAxZjgzZTJm" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-bans-us-congress-2014-7" >Wikipedia Bans US Congress From Editing Articles</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/glasnost-wikipedias-boss-shape-site-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-refuses-to-delete-monkey-picture-2014-8Wikipedia Won't Delete A Photographer's Most Famous Picture For One Hilarious Reasonhttp://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-refuses-to-delete-monkey-picture-2014-8
Wed, 06 Aug 2014 09:15:42 -0400Matthew Sparkes
<div class="firstPar">
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/53e22841eab8ea827b6c1093-668-501/macaque-selfie-david-slater.jpg" border="0" alt="macaque selfie david slater" />Wikimedia, the organisation behind Wikipedia, has refused a photographer&rsquo;s repeated requests to remove one of his images which is used online without his permission, claiming that because a monkey pressed the shutter button it owns the copyright.</p>
</div>
<div class="secondPar">
<p><a href="http://www.djsphotography.co.uk/DavidJSlater.htm"><strong>British nature photographer David Slater</strong></a>&nbsp;was in Indonesia in 2011 attempting to get the perfect image of a crested black macaque when one of the animals came up to investigate his equipment, hijacked a camera and took hundreds of selfies.</p>
</div>
<div class="thirdPar">
<p>Many of them were blurry and some were pointed at the jungle floor, but among them were a handful of fantastic images, including a selfie taken by a grinning macaque which made headlines around the world and brought Mr Slater his 15 minutes of fame.</p>
</div>
<div class="fourthPar">
<p>"They were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button,"&nbsp;<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8615859/Monkey-steals-camera-to-snap-himself.html"><strong>he said at the time</strong></a>. "The sound got his attention and he kept pressing it. At first it scared the rest of them away but they soon came back - it was amazing to watch.</p>
</div>
<div class="fifthPar">
<p>"He must have taken hundreds of pictures by the time I got my camera back, but not very many were in focus. He obviously hadn't worked that out yet."</p>
<p>But after appearing on websites, newspapers, magazines and television shows around the world, Mr Slater is now facing a legal battle with Wikimedia after the organisation added the image to its collection of royalty-free images online. The&nbsp;<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page"><strong>Wikimedia Commons</strong></a>&nbsp;is a collection of 22,302,592 images and videos that are free to use by anyone online, and editors have included Mr Slater's image among its database.</p>
<p>The Gloucestershire-based photographer now claims that the decision is jeopardising his income as anyone can take the image and publish it for free, without having to pay him a royalty. He complained To Wikimedia that he owned the copyright of the image, but a recent transparency report from the group, which details all the removal requests it has received, reveals that editors decided that the monkey itself actually owned the copyright because it was the one that pressed the shutter button.</p>
<p>Mr Slater now faces an estimated &pound;10,000 legal bill to take the matter to court.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If the monkey took it, it owns copyright, not me, that&rsquo;s their basic argument. What they don&rsquo;t realise is that it needs a court to decide that,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>The image has been removed in the past when he complained, but different editors regularly upload it once again.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Some of their editors think it should be put back up. I&rsquo;ve told them it's not public domain, they&rsquo;ve got no right to say that its public domain. A monkey pressed the button, but I did all the setting up.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Mr Slater said that the photography trip was extremely expensive and that he has not made much money from the image despite its enormous popularity.</p>
<p>&ldquo;That trip cost me about &pound;2,000 for that monkey shot. Not to mention the &pound;5,000 of equipment I carried, the insurance, the computer stuff I used to process the images. Photography is an expensive profession that&rsquo;s being encroached upon. They&rsquo;re taking our livelihoods away,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;For every 100,000 images I take, one makes money that keeps me going. And that was one of those images. It was like a year of work, really.&rdquo;</p>
</div><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-swedish-science-teacher-has-invented-a-bot-that-has-edited-3-million-wikipedia-articles-2014-8" >A Swedish Science Teacher Invented A Bot That Has Edited 3 Million Wikipedia Articles</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-refuses-to-delete-monkey-picture-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/this-swedish-science-teacher-has-invented-a-bot-that-has-edited-3-million-wikipedia-articles-2014-8A Swedish Science Teacher Invented A Bot That Has Edited 3 Million Wikipedia Articleshttp://www.businessinsider.com/this-swedish-science-teacher-has-invented-a-bot-that-has-edited-3-million-wikipedia-articles-2014-8
Tue, 05 Aug 2014 08:36:00 -0400Alex Hern
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/53e0fdb269bedd14542f9ee6-543-715/lsj.jpg" border="0" alt="lsj" /></p><p>Sverker Johansson is, indirectly, one of the most prolific editors on Wikipedia, the collectively-edited online encyclopedia.</p>
<p>The Swedish science teacher, who goes by the username Lsj on the website, is the creator of Lsjbot, an automatic editor of wikipedia which <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/17/swedish-wikipedia-1-million-articles/">helped make</a> the Swedish language version of the site the eighth in the world to hit one million articles.</p>
<p>So far, Lsjbot has created 3m articles across multiple versions of the site, and racked up more than 10m individual edits. Its main task, according to Johnasson, is creating articles about all species of plants and animals, and most of those ten million edits are related to that task one way or another.</p>
<p>Once upon a time, bots on Wikipedia were rare, but Johansson says that these days they&rsquo;re an increasingly important part of the machinery of Wikipedia. His own story is typical: &ldquo;At first, around 2007, I started editing Wikipedia &lsquo;by hand&rsquo;, the same way as everybody else; then, in 2011, I started editing by bot.&rdquo;</p>
<p>There are limits to what can be done by bots, of course. &ldquo;Anything requiring real creativity or real language understanding requires a human mind directly at the keyboard,&rdquo; Johansson explains. But of the tasks that can be done automatically, an increasing amount are.</p>
<p>&ldquo;[They do] lots of maintenance work. Locating and sometimes fixing syntax errors and other anomalies in articles. Identifying vandalism.&rdquo; On English Wikipedia, the bots are also used for &ldquo;repairing vandalism.&rdquo; And everywhere, they can be found &ldquo;updating stuff, archiving old discussions, adding date stamps to manual problem reports, etc. Changing [for example] the categorization of articles.&rdquo;</p>
<h3>Robots writing Nasa&rsquo;s history?</h3>
<p>A major hazard of that approach, though, is that articles end up being created, not because they to the sum of human knowledge, but because they can be created automatically.</p>
<p>In 2008 &ndash; almost prehistory, by Wikipedia bot standards &ndash; an algorithm called ClueBot II &ldquo;wrote&rdquo; 15,000 articles on asteroids, by parsing and rewriting public data from NASA&rsquo;s database.</p>
<p>Those articles sat there, being edited by other bots &ndash; one changed the tags, another linked to the Japanese version, a third corrected a style guide issue &ndash; until an actual human <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_talk:Main_Belt_asteroid_stubs">realised</a> that having &ldquo;an out of date, broken, copy of the NASA web site&rdquo; wasn&rsquo;t the best way to run an encyclopaedia.</p>
<p>In 2012, the creation was finally undone, and today, all of Cluebot&rsquo;s work lives in one &lsquo;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10627_Ookuninushi">list of minor planets</a>&rsquo;.</p>
<h3>&lsquo;Bots go through an approval process&rsquo;</h3>
<p>Erik M&ouml;ller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the site, is unconcerned by examples like Cluebot.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There is a comprehensive policy governing the use of bots,&rdquo; he told the Guardian.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Bots typically go through an approval process where a determination is made by humans whether the task they perform is useful. Bots that merely perform unnecessary busywork are either not approved in the first place or shut down.&rdquo;</p>
<p>But he concedes that &ldquo;the structured data in Wikimedia projects in particular will increasingly be maintained in automated ways, which should help keep things up-to-date and reduce the potential for human error in manually importing or updating numbers&rdquo;.</p>
<h3>Robot: freeing journalists to do journalism</h3>
<p>Wikipedia is by no means the only site seeing an increase in the amount of content created by algorithms. Perhaps the most notable example is the Associated Press, which announced in June that a robot would be taking over the majority of US corporate earnings stories.</p>
<p>The AP&rsquo;s managing editor, Lou Ferrara, <a href="http://blog.ap.org/2014/06/30/a-leap-forward-in-quarterly-earnings-stories/?_ga=1.173729507.1387938425.1383730171">reassured readers</a> that the technology would &ldquo;free journalists to do more journalism and less data processing&rdquo;.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We are going to use our brains and time in more enterprising ways during earnings season,&rdquo; he added.</p>
<p>Johansson, for his part, defends the practice of automatically creating thousands of articles.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Once in a while some really obscure place ends up in the news &ndash; say there is a plane crash in some hamlet you never heard of&hellip; But since we can&rsquo;t know in advance which hamlet will be in the news tomorrow, better make a stub about every single hamlet.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&bull; <em><a href="http://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania">Wikimania</a>, the annual Wikimedia Foundation conference, runs from 7-9 August at London&rsquo;s Barbican Centre</em></p>
<p>&bull; <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/02/wikipedia-page-google-link-hidden-right-to-be-forgotten"><strong>Wikipedia link to be hidden in Google under &lsquo;right to be forgotten&rsquo; law</strong></a></p>
<!-- Guardian Watermark: internal-code/content/443733222|2014-08-05T10:29:27Z|4a1309cee82487045d276650db5d239c0bc5e6fc -->
<p>This article originally appeared on <a rel="canonical">guardian.co.uk</a></p>
<p><img class="nc_pixel" src="https://pixel.newscred.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT1mMmMwYmJjMGVlODU3OTA2MTQ5ODVlOWZhN2I5NjYyYSZub25jZT1iOGQwMGIwNC0zNTBmLTQ3MjQtOWVlNy04ZTZlNGJiZDAzNWUmcHVibGlzaGVyPTczMGViODZhYjU5ZjBkNDE5MjZhYzY1YjAxZjgzZTJm" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-swedish-science-teacher-has-invented-a-bot-that-has-edited-3-million-wikipedia-articles-2014-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-bans-us-congress-2014-7Wikipedia Bans US Congress From Editing Articleshttp://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-bans-us-congress-2014-7
Fri, 25 Jul 2014 10:01:00 -0400Alex Hern
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/53d261d3eab8ead00759b0a6-1200-924/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-9.jpg" border="0" alt="Jimmy Wales Wikipedia" /></p><p>Wikipedia has been forced to ban users inside the US Congress building from making edits to the collaborative encyclopedia, after at least one member of staff began trolling the site.</p>
<p>A number of edits, apparently made in jest, have been picked up by&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/congressedits">the automatic twitter bot Congress Edits</a>, which monitors Wikipedia for changes to the site made by accounts with IP addresses coming from inside the US legislature.</p>
<p>For instance, one such edit changed the Wikipedia page for Reptilians, the lizard people who are the subject of numerous conspiracy theories which say that they control everything from the British monarchy to the American government.</p>
<p>The wag added the line "these allegations are completely unsubstantiated and have no basis in reality," which was duly tweeted out by the account.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>Reptilians Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives <a href="http://t.co/B7VLkhLsb8">http://t.co/B7VLkhLsb8</a></p>
&mdash; congress-edits (@congressedits) <a href="https://twitter.com/congressedits/statuses/492027099499462657">July 23, 2014</a></blockquote>
<p>Other edits accused the Cuban government of faking the moon landings, and named the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an alien wizard.</p>
<p>It seems that those edits were the final straw for Wikipedia's administrators, who implemented a 10-day ban on any changes coming from one particular IP address within the US Congress, "due to disruptive editing originating from that address".</p>
<p>Users within the legislature can still edit the site if they sign up for an account &ndash; and other IP addresses within Congress also still work, as shown by the latest (innocuous) edit tweeted by Congress Edits:<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8" type="text/javascript"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>Orly Taitz Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives <a href="http://t.co/vXmm2ssQkl">http://t.co/vXmm2ssQkl</a></p>
&mdash; congress-edits (@congressedits) <a href="https://twitter.com/congressedits/statuses/492654758994661376">July 25, 2014</a></blockquote>
<p>Congress Edits is indirectly the brainchild of journalist and coder&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/tomscott">Tom Scott</a>. In early July, Scott created&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/parliamentedits">Parliament Edits</a>, a Twitter account tracking anyone making edits to Wikipedia from a parliamentary computer.</p>
<p>Scott's creation followed in the footsteps of numerous&nbsp;<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/embarrassing-edits-made-to-politicians-wikipedia-pages-by">news stories</a>&nbsp;of embarrassing edits to Wikipedia coming from within the House of Commons.</p>
<p>Someone&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Pritchard_(politician)&amp;diff=prev&amp;oldid=566744203">added information</a>&nbsp;about MP Mark Pritchard's divorce;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andy_Burnham&amp;diff=prev&amp;oldid=562417212">someone excised</a>&nbsp;a "controversy" section from Andy Burnham's page entirely; and someone&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_Razzall,_Baron_Razzall&amp;diff=prev&amp;oldid=516802060">cleared references</a>&nbsp;to Lord Razzil's shareholdings in an African mining company.&nbsp;</p>
<p>There have been&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/jul/18/wikipedia-pages-edited-most-from-inside-houses-parliament">at least 5,900 edits</a>&nbsp;from parliamentary IPs in the past decade.</p>
<p>Scott also released the code to the Parliament Edits bot, allowing similar accounts to be set up for other nation's legislatures.</p>
<p>Those led to their own stories: In mid-July, the Russian clone,<a href="https://twitter.com/RuGovEdits/">RuGovEdits</a>, discovered that&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/RuGovEdits/statuses/490067268529704960">someone inside the Russian government</a>was editing the Wikipedia pages referring to the attack on MH17,<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/18/5917099/russia-spotted-editing-wikipedia-page-of-downed-malaysia-air-jet">changing the text</a>&nbsp;to accuse Ukrainian soldiers of downing the Malaysian Airlines plane.</p>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8" type="text/javascript"></script><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/robot-most-prolific-wikipedia-author-2014-7" >This Robot Has Written More Wikipedia Articles Than Anyone Alive</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-bans-us-congress-2014-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/robot-most-prolific-wikipedia-author-2014-7This Robot Has Written More Wikipedia Articles Than Anyone Alivehttp://www.businessinsider.com/robot-most-prolific-wikipedia-author-2014-7
Mon, 14 Jul 2014 16:49:00 -0400Douglas Main
<p><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/534e77126da811351624be5e-800-/rtr2wg3v.jpg" border="0" alt="Wikipedia" width="800" /></p><p></p>
<p>You might think writing 10,000 articles per day would be impossible. But not for a Swede named Sverker Johansson. He created a computer program that has written a total of 2.7 million articles, making Johansson the most prolific author, by far, on the "internet's encyclopedia." His contributions account for 8.5 percent of the articles on Wikipedia, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-this-author-10-000-wikipedia-articles-is-a-good-days-work-1405305001?mod=_newsreel_4&amp;cmpid=newscred">the Wall Street Journal reports</a>.</p>
<p>But how can a bot write so many articles, and do it coherently? As Johansson--a science teacher with degrees in linguistics, civil engineering, economics and particle physics--explained to the WSJ, the bot scrapes information from various trusted sources, and then cobbles that material together, typically into a very short entry, or "stub." Many of the articles cover the taxonomy of little-known animals such as butterflies and beetles, and also small towns in the Philippines (his wife is Filipino).</p>
<p>Johansson's creation, known as <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/17/swedish-wikipedia-1-million-articles/?cmpid=newscred">Lsjbot</a>, is certainly not the only bot to write articles meant for human eyes. For example, the <a href="http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/associated-press-will-use-robots-write-articles?cmpid=newscred">Associated Press just announced that it will use robots to write thousands of pieces</a>, and other news outlets use programs to write articles, especially finance and sports stories. And on Wikipedia, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/wikipedia-edited-bots-thats-good-thing-230234?cmpid=newscred">half of all of the edits are made by bots</a>.</p>
<p>Several long-time members of Wikipedia are not happy that so many articles are being written by non-humans. But Johansson defends his bot, pointing out that the articles it writes are accurate (although there have been some glitches that he claims have been corrected), and can very useful. For example, Lsjbot wrote a stub about the town of Basey, in the Philippines. When Typhoon Yolanda hit the town, causing deaths, people were able to visit this stub and find out more about the town and its location.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.popsci.com/article/science/bot-has-written-more-wikipedia-articles-anybody?cmpid=newscred">This article</a> originally appeared on Popular Science</p>
<p><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/article-assets.newscred.com/popsci-logo-175.jpg" border="0" alt="Popular Science Logo" width="175" /></p>
<p><img class="nc_pixel" src="https://pixel.newscred.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT1iNDE4NGE0NGNiMzEzZTMyZDEzY2JiNmRiMzQzZDVmZSZub25jZT1jMTQ5ODY5NS1hMTM2LTQ1NmUtODgzZS1kNTdhM2YyZGRkNWImcHVibGlzaGVyPTczMGViODZhYjU5ZjBkNDE5MjZhYzY1YjAxZjgzZTJm" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/soylent-review-2014-7" >Soylent Is Like A Productivity Cheat Code — And More Observations From Two Weeks On The Meal Replacement Drink</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/robot-most-prolific-wikipedia-author-2014-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-tim-howard-world-cup-defense-secretary-2014-7White House Has The Perfect Response When Asked About Making Tim Howard Secretary Of Defensehttp://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-tim-howard-world-cup-defense-secretary-2014-7
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 14:13:00 -0400Colin Campbell
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/53b4538a69bedd0476e18533-480-/tim%20howard%20wiki2.jpg" border="0" alt="tim howard wiki2" width="480" /></p><p>During Tuesday's World Cup match, U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard had so much <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-howard-saves-world-cup-belgium-2014-7">success blocking shots</a> that someone named him the new secretary of defense <a href="https://twitter.com/daniellelliot/statuses/484137590086303744">on Wikipedia</a>.</p>
<p>It turns out, however, that the White House isn't prepared to replace current Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel with Howard just yet.</p>
<p>"I don't have any personnel announcements to make," Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday after a reporter asked "if the White House had anything to do" with the Wikipedia change.</p>
<p>Earnest's initial response was, word-for-word, exactly what the White House press secretary <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22I+don%27t+have+any+personnel+announcements+to+make%2C&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;aq=t&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;channel=fflb#channel=fflb&amp;q=site%3Awhitehouse.gov+%22I+don%27t+have+any+personnel+announcements+to+make%22&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;safe=off">always says</a> when asked more serious questions about speculation surrounding major cabinet picks.</p>
<p>Earnest nevertheless predicted Hagel would have nothing but admiration for Howard's "ability to repel an opponent's attacks."</p>
<p>"Unfortunately I can't claim credit for that brilliant idea that was manifested on Wikipedia," Earnest said. "But I think even Secretary Hagel would agree with me that Tim Howard demonstrated an ability to repel an opponent's attacks with remarkable courage and bravery and athleticism yesterday."</p>
<p>For what it's worth, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales called the prank "exquisite."</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>I do NOT APPROVE of vandalizing wikipedia for comedic effect. But this is exquisite: <a href="http://t.co/ReAWTYyppQ">http://t.co/ReAWTYyppQ</a></p>
&mdash; Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) <a href="https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/statuses/484284073259462657">July 2, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8" type="text/javascript"></script><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-tim-howard-world-cup-defense-secretary-2014-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/pr-agencies-agree-to-stop-wikipedia-edits-2014-6CONFIRMED: Companies Have Been Editing Wikipedia Pages To Make Themselves Look Betterhttp://www.businessinsider.com/pr-agencies-agree-to-stop-wikipedia-edits-2014-6
Wed, 11 Jun 2014 12:56:00 -0400Katie Richards
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/539778a16bb3f780102ef7b2-1200-924/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-8.jpg" border="0" alt="Jimmy Wales Wikipedia" style="color: #000000;" /></p><p>Eleven top PR firms, including Ogilvy &amp; Mather, Edelman, and FleishmanHillard, released a joint statement stating they will abide by Wikipedia&rsquo;s editing policies. The statement is essentially an admission that for years PR agencies edited Wikipedia pages on their clients' behalf, ostensibly to remove "errors" but also to delete negative information about companies and to add fluffy "good news" points.</p>
<p>Wikipedia went to war against such editing &mdash; not an easy task given that PR agencies employ armies of professionals editing the site from thousands of different accounts and locations. The statement is effectively the beginning of an end to that war.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/technology/16blog.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=1&amp;">History's most famous sockpuppet was probably John Mackey</a>, the CEO of Whole Foods, who used a fictional screenname on Yahoo Finance's message boards for nearly eight years to promote his stock.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statement_on_Wikipedia_from_participating_communications_firms">The statement</a> lays out five points that the agencies will follow in hopes of restoring accuracy and credibility to the Wikipedia name.</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p>One point states:&nbsp;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To the extent we become aware of potential violations of Wikipedia policies by our respective firms, to investigate the matter and seek corrective actions, as appropriate and consistent with out policies.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A number of the 11 agencies have released their own statements as well. In <a href="http://social.ogilvy.com/a-multi-agency-commitment-to-bridging-the-gap-with-wikipedia/">a post on Ogilvy &amp; Mather&rsquo;s website</a> the company&rsquo;s Managing Director of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Marshall Mason, recognizes their industry's misuse of the site, which he states has led to a &ldquo;deep mistrust&rdquo; of Wikipedia. While the agency recognizes that progress may not be easy or fast, the creation of the statement is a big step forward for the agencies.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the past few years PR firms have been called into question for editing client pages to present their clients in a better light. The public relations company Wiki-PR, founded in 2010 by Darius Fisher and Jordan French, triggered <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-cease-and-desist-letter-to-wiki-pr-2013-11#ixzz34KuBRqF4">an investigation by Wikipedia into hundreds of "sockpuppet" accounts</a> back in 2012. Sockpuppets are people <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">or groups being paid to push a client&rsquo;s ideals or agendas through edits to Wikipedia. Readers have almost no way of knowing whether edits to Wikipedia are legit or done by spinmasters.</span> <a href="http://www.wiki-pr.com/">Wiki-PR claims</a> to help companies learn how to use and interact in the Wikipedia community to help firms, "claim your top spot in Google search results." &nbsp; &nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Over 300 of these so-called sockpuppet accounts were served <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-cease-and-desist-letter-to-wiki-pr-2013-11">cease-and-desist letters</a> in November banning the organization from Wikipedia. The&nbsp;<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/6b/2013-11-19_C%26D_letter_to_WikiPR_from_Cooley.pdf">letter says</a>:</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">When outside publicity firms and their agents conceal or misrepresent their identity by creating or allowing false, unauthorized, or misleading user accounts, Wikipedia's reputation is harmed. This practice, which sometimes referred to as sockpuppetry or meatpuppetry, is expressly prohibited by Wikipedia's Terms of Use. &nbsp;</span></p>
<p>Other larger agencies have not yet publically agreed to the terms, but the tide appears to be turning against PR firms who edit Wikipedia.</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-cease-and-desist-letter-to-wiki-pr-2013-11#ixzz34KuBRqF4" >Wikipedia Sends Cease-And-Desist Letter to 300-Strong Sockpuppet Army</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/pr-agencies-agree-to-stop-wikipedia-edits-2014-6#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/dont-rely-on-wikipedia-to-provide-accurate-medical-information-2014-5Here's Something You Should Know Before Googling Your Symptomshttp://www.businessinsider.com/dont-rely-on-wikipedia-to-provide-accurate-medical-information-2014-5
Tue, 27 May 2014 18:01:00 -0400Pamela Engel
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5384e9176bb3f75b26dfdb95-480-/wikipedia-3.jpg" border="0" alt="Wikipedia" width="480" /></p><p>It might not be wise to trust Wikipedia, the sixth most popular website on the internet, to provide accurate medical information.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.jaoa.org/content/114/5/368.full">recent study</a> shows that Wikipedia articles about medical conditions are likely to be rife with errors.</p>
<p>Researchers looked at Wikipedia articles for the <a href="http://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/data_files/publications/st331/stat331.pdf" target="_blank">10 most costly medical conditions</a> in the U.S. &mdash; including&nbsp;coronary artery disease, lung cancer, depression, osteoarthritis, hypertension, diabetes, and back pain &mdash; and found that <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27586356">nine out of 10 contained information</a> that is not in line with the latest medical research.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Anyone can edit Wikipedia entries, and medical information is complicated and ever-evolving, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. That said, it also shouldn't be interpreted as evidence that Wikipedia is uniquely unreliable.</p>
<p>Back in 2005, a study in <a href="http://blogs.nature.com/nascent/2005/12/comparing_wikipedia_and_britan_1.html" target="_blank">Nature</a>&nbsp;found that&nbsp;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica and Wikipedia had roughly the same error rate in a subset of their scientific articles. (Britannica&nbsp;<a href="http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf" target="_blank">contested</a>&nbsp;that study's conclusions.) Even the best sources of medical information cannot possibly include all of the latest research, and while peer-review is an important safeguard, it <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v480/n7378/full/480449a.html" target="_blank">does not mean</a> published studies are unassailably correct.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Still, the new finding is particularly troubling since </span><a href="http://www.ijmijournal.com/article/S1386-5056(09)00075-6/abstract" target="_blank">preliminary</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/APA/26483?pfc=101&amp;spc=224" target="_blank">research</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> suggests that physicians and medical students commonly admit to using Wikipedia as a reference.&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This doesn't necessarily mean that information found on Wikipedia influences the decisions of doctors, who consult other sources as well, but it is possible.</span></p>
<p>Another, more pressing concern is that patients might be making their own medical decisions based on information they find on the internet. In the past year, 72% of internet users admitted to looking online for health information, <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/PIP_HealthOnline.pdf">according to</a> a Pew Research report.</p>
<p>The bottom line: always check with a doctor when you have a medical question, <a href="http://summaries.cochrane.org/" target="_blank">consult peer-reviewed research yourself</a>, and never rely on the internet to diagnose or treat a problem.</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-presbyterian-columbia-hipaa-settlement-2014-5" >Hospital To Pay Millions After Embarrassing Data Breach Put Patient Info On Google</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dont-rely-on-wikipedia-to-provide-accurate-medical-information-2014-5#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/4chans-christopher-poole-wealth-2014-4The Creator Of One Of The World's Biggest And Most Powerful Websites Is Not Richhttp://www.businessinsider.com/4chans-christopher-poole-wealth-2014-4
Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:33:00 -0400Nicholas Carlson
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/4chans-christopher-poole-wealth-2014-4"><strong>Click for the story &gt;</strong></a></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/4chans-christopher-poole-wealth-2014-4#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/meterfy-is-like-wikipedia-but-for-numbers-2014-4The Wikipedia For Numbers Just Made My Job Easier, But It Needs Your Help To Be Even Betterhttp://www.businessinsider.com/meterfy-is-like-wikipedia-but-for-numbers-2014-4
Thu, 03 Apr 2014 19:49:26 -0400Karyne Levy
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/533de2906bb3f7b4420c755f-480-/numberwheel-1.jpg" border="0" alt="number_wheel" width="480" /></p><p>Do you want to know the population of China? (1,363,650,000 in 2014.) How about the number of Xbox Ones that were sold? (4,000,000)</p>
<p>A new crowdsource site called <a href="https://meterfy.com/">Meterfy</a> wants to make surfacing those numbers as easy as typing your query into a search bar.</p>
<p>"Meterfy is a place anyone can contribute any fact they would like about a number. It's also somewhere to discover countless numerical snippets of wisdom from absolutely every walk of life," co-founder Peter Walsham <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/calling-all-number-nerds/">tells TechCrunch</a>.</p>
<p>You could, of course, search Google for particular numbers. But the information is hard to parse through, and skimming through an article just to get this seemingly simple piece of information is surprisingly difficult.</p>
<p>That's where Meterfy comes in.</p>
<p>And it doesn't let in just useless junk, or spam, either. Meterfy encourages users to source their information. And numbers contributed by reputable organizations will certainly be trusted. You also have to create an account if you'd like to contribute to the site, which should help them keep an eye on numbers that don't add up (pun intended).</p>
<p>There's also more certainty when using numbers over, say, crowdsourcing text or multimedia, Walsham tells TechCrunch.</p>
<p>How good it is depends on how much information people contribute to it, of course, and right now there's not a whole lot. When <a href="https://meterfy.com/search/population">I typed "Population" in the search bar</a>, only some actual population numbers are surfaced, as well as the rankings of populations in certain countries.</p>
<p>But if numbers are your thing, or you just want to learn some interesting number-related information, the site is certainly on its way to being very useful.</p>
<p>Here's a sample of what you see when you type "Population" in the search bar:</p>
<p><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/533df2a26da811be514e3a5c-943-523/meterfy.png" border="0" alt="meterfy" width="800" /></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/meterfy-is-like-wikipedia-but-for-numbers-2014-4#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p>